By David Futrelle
One of Reddit’s Men Going Their Own Way, a gentleman known as Donald-Hump-Jr, has convinced himself that zinc is the magical coronavirus cure-all, and that everyone who doesn’t have enough of the magical mineral in their system will likely die from the virus.
This last bit, evidently, makes Mr. Hump happy.
If Coronavirus is really hurting those with Zinc deficiency (old people, high carb diets, Soy Boys, possibly vegan), wouldn’t it be hilarious if all those who eat red meat (high levels of Zinc absorption/retention) remained at the end?
I am no expert at this, but would it be a great male reset if all this virus was due to poor eating habits that created a generation of pussified men?
Yes, what better punishment for eating a lot of vegetables than horrific death?
Setting aside Mr.. Hump’s inhumanity for a moment, his zinc fetish isn’t borne out by the scientific evidence. It’s true that one of the results of zinc deficiency is a weakened immune system, which could leave those without enough zinc especially susceptible to pneumonia. But zinc deficiency is relatively rare in the developed world — in which Mr. Hump presumably lives — and can be remedied with supplements and relatively small changes in diet. If zinc deficiency does indeed make getting the coronavirus a bigger risk, the people it’s going to hurt aren’t western “soy boys” but poor people in the developing world, where zinc deficiency is much more common.
Also, “soy boys” aren’t really a thing; memes aside, there really isn’t a subculture of “pussified men” whose pussification is due to the excessive intake of soy. Meanwhile, vegans, who do run the risk of zinc deficiency, don’t need to start eating red meat; they can instead add things like sprouts, baked beans and wholegrain bread to their diet, if they don’t eat them already. (Soybeans are actually high in zinc; it just doesn’t absorb well.)
And if Mr. Hump really thinks that high doses of zinc are some sort of coronavirus cure — as he seems to suggest — he should think again. While zinc can help to shorten the length of a cold, it doesn’t help with flu, and too much zinc can cause an assortment of health problems and potential drug interactions.
So, no, there won’t be a “great male reset,” and drinking a soy latte won’t mark you for death.
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@Buttercup
Sadly, I’m sure at least a few conservatives think that guns will help them keep away the coronavirus. The idiocy of the American right winger knows no bounds.
Hmm…what lesson could we take from that? Couldn’t possibly be that toxic masculinity is unhelpful and that guns aren’t a silver bullet solution, now could it?
@Big Titty Demon –
Very good point. Racism is definitely a part of it.
@Naglfar, the herd immunity plan was abandoned fairly shortly when it was pointed out that the NHS would be utterly swamped and deaths could be counted in the hundreds of thousands (and coincidentally I am sure, most elderly people vote Tory). Right now we’re looking to break 5K deaths tomorrow, but the peak might still be a week away.
Course he is a leader of a party that has spent the best part of ten years gutting the NHS, letting fat cats run hospital “trusts”, and refusing to raise pay and conditions for frontline workers. I haven’t been partaking in the clap for the NHS here, because I am in a very safe Tory seat and I know nearly everyone here voted that party in year after year because tax cuts, leaving Europe and getting rid of brown people are more important than social safety nets and an NHS that’s fit for purpose. Bleh.
@Naglfar
As a certain wise Princess-General said, there are some problems you can’t solve by jumping into your space fighter and blowing things up.
@Buttercup:
Dems are so afraid of that “gun grabber” label, I suppose. Also, if she had ordered them to close, her life would be in danger.
Sure, a great male reset, one that means lots of men have to die. As usual, the manosphere is showing its hatred of men. And naturally, it continues its hatred of all other living beings.
@Kat
I think at the root of it all they hate themselves, and they channel that hate towards everyone else.
The guns for self defense crowd are convinced, as they always are, that we’re one bad day away from roving gangs suddenly appearing. So they supposedly need guns to defend their “supplies” from the gangs. The really paranoid ones think it won’t be just gangs, but the forces of the Deep State, who will use this crisis to overthrow Trump and replace him with evil gay Muslim transgender Marxists.
I saw it reported on Finnish news that many USians seriously fear a shortage of law enforcement, if a large portion of the (police) workforce gets sick/quarantined at the same time. Consequently, there’s a surge of new people who want to become gun owners. This poses problems in states where some formal training is required for gun license, as gun instructors can’t operate under lockdown orders.
I suppose serious gun preppers probably don’t feel they acutely need more guns or ammo for self-defense. However, they might be panic buying if they anticipate that any temporary closure of gun shops might turn out to be a slippery slope to permanent closure. That would probably also mean they’re principally opposed to any government-mandated gun shop closure, no matter what kind of emergency is going on.
the rate of contamination and death among 20-30y old in my region is tragically high because of that kind of fuckers who would really prefer a magic bullet who take 10m of effort instead of the long haul of a proper containement.
That annoy me to no end. Partly because I start to feel bad being locked up at home and thoses fuckers will lengthen that, partly because they may well kill people I care about.
According to this belgium site from the Fundation against Cancer, too much Zinc can have the following effects (outside some possible effects against some cancer treatments):
– weaken the immune system
– indigestion
– nausea (and vomiting)
– diarhea
– headache
– skin condition
– fatigue
As many things in the world, balance is needed. Stuffing yourself with meat and getting a too high zinc rate in the blood will not help you against the Covid-19, on the contrary…
Yep.
As a non-american, looking at your country just about everything looks stupidly extreme. We have conservative religious fundamentalists too. But even before the lockdown, when the government anounced that indoor events would be limited to 100 people, the cinemas flounted it by having only 99 people per screening (not per cinema), while the catholics, protestants, muslims, jews and sikhs anounced that they would close all their houses of worship.
concerning herd immunity:
My brother is reading all the current papers regarding the virus (and as an immunologist he understands them better than me). According to him most Experts actually agree that gradual Herimmunity is the only way to deal with this, as social distancing and lockdowns will slow the spread, but not erradicate the disease. However it is still strongly suggested to have some social distancing measures, to have it not spread so wuickly that it overwhelms the health care system. Sweden so far has no lockdown and theiry system hasn’t collapsed. However their system is much more robust than Italys, Frances, or Englands.
And if you live in the US…well…not having robust nationalised health care (most deaths in Italy are in the North, where there are fewer public, and more small private hospitals) is the worst scenario for this.
The only good news is, that it seems like the chance of having only mild symptoms is far higher than initially thought. Island did lots of testing and according to them around 50% of the infected don’t even develope symptoms. However that only betters your chances as an individual. For the system the total number of cases and the lethalitiy rate isn’t as important. There its about the total number of heavy cases versus the number of ICUs. And of course, if the system breaks down, the lethality rate will go up.
@Tim Gueguen
This is of course a projection, since conservatives are the ones most likely to attack and steal from people.
@romaine : he outed him as not being an epidemiologist, because herd immunity on average cannot happen without a vaccine or at least a serum. Herd immunity would at best be a lucky break.
(some specific disease allow that, but then they go extinct very fast, and it’s not the common case by far)
It’s actually not terribly clear if Sweden have better health care than other country. What they do have is a country where propagation is hard because there is seriously few people and they dislike being close to each other. On that level, they almost live under permanent voluntary lockdown.
@Ohlmann
Well herd Immunity has happened historically, with many epidemics, the problem is that way it killy of most of those who are very vulnerable to that. Also I don’t think that most epidemiologist agree, that herd immunity can be reached only through vaccination.
As I said, thats not his opinion (he doesn’t really have one as this is not his field of expertise), but the hope of many of the authors publishing articles right now. Dr. Pietro Vernazza argues that only immunity through having fought of mild cases, coupled with a much higher – undetected infection rate (R. Li et al argue that up to 86% might have been undetected in Wuhan) could explain why there arent secondary outbrakes in China by now.
And yes, I know that sweden has a different approach to closeness, however the most hard hit regions in Italy are not the ones where people have this caricaturesque closeness, that you might find in the southern regions. Also sweden has an average health care system for an EU-country, while years of austerity gutted the systems in Italy and Spain. And that has nothing to do with those systems being state run and “socialist”, it has something to do with a neoliberal austerity regiment that has bin pushed within the European Union in the last decade.
Good chance this particular MGTOW is an InfoWarrior. Ever since Alex Jones got smacked down by the New York AG’s office for shilling colloidal silver snake oil as a cure for COVID-19, he’s pivoted to constantly touting the benefits of zinc and none-too-subtly reminding his audience of credulous idiots that it’s a major ingredient in his “Real Red Pill”. (Transphobic assholes like Jones constantly using a pop culture reference that was coined by a couple of trans women will never not elicit an eyeroll from me; Jones still refers to the as “The Wachowski Brothers”, because of course he does.)
@sarah_kay_gee
The greatest irony of the “red pill” is that seeing as the movie was made by two then-closeted trans* women, the red pill has been thought by film scholars to represent estrogen. Alex Jones and his audience would have a collective meltdown if they realized the implication that they should start taking estrogen.
My priest has just figured out how to do services through a zoom meeting so I’m just gonna spend Easter Sunday like that.
@Lainy
I’m hosting a Passover Seder over Zoom later this week. It’s honestly a lot easier than one in person because I don’t have to cook for many people. Though I do miss the seeing people in person part.
@Ohlmann:
Ok, my bad, controlled Herd Imunity was until recently the idea that the experts at the german Robert Koch institute councelled, but now they seem to have backtracked.
And in addition to that, herd immunity almost never happened naturally. It certainly did not happen for any of the known big epidemics. Which make sense : a virus or bacteria who allow herd immunity to happen will die out pretty soon. Similar to how very little species starve themselves to death
Some diseases avoid that by mutating fast enough that people cannot keep the immunity for long, meaning no herd immunity at all. Some have animal reservoirs that mean that you can get infected easily even with herd immunity. Some spread slowly enough that you cannot naturally get herd immunity.
Anything that pretend to use herd immunity without a vaccine or a solid treatment for diseased people is a crank. It’s like pretending to have perpetual motion or free energy ; if things were that simple, there would not be a problem to begin with. In fact, talking about herd immunity without a vaccine is litteraly talking about letting the problem solve itself. Which, sure, it can happen, especially with diseases that recently jumped to the human specie and might not be adapted to thrive with it. But it would be a seriously lucky event.
Well if it was that obviously wrong why did some pretty major institutes promote it till recently? The german RKI is certainly not a fake news machine or fad. However as I saig, they didn’t promote people getting out and infectign themselfes, but hoped to control the spread.
Also immunity or at least adaption did happen historically. The Flu Pandemic of 1918 died down pretty much by itself, measels got far less fatal for europeans (by comparison native americans where totaly new to that disease and the estimates of the number of death in the americas are staggering) and in the 17th century those places that where badly hit by the bubonic plague coincide with the places where it never got in the 14th century. The most common theory to explain that is, that the places where people survived it in the 14th century had at least some form of adaption to the bacteria. And the diseases that wash through europe in waves from the late medieval period onwards change pretty much every century with one getting less and less common without a cure being developed.
@Naglfar
I don’t think the idiocy of any right winger has heard of any bounds. When Finland closed its borders, I saw a screencap of an Internet comment section where some anti-immigration jerk lauded the decision, saying it should have been done years ago and just waiting for the permission to go out into the streets and take care of all those pesky foreigners who had managed to get in, since, you know, they’re the ones who brought Covid into Finland.
Yes, I’m sure we have the virus here in Finland because of the influx of refugees some years back, or the steady trickle we’ve had since, and not because of all the air traffic we have or because we just travel abroad a lot.
I’m not sure I’m glad I now know there’s at least one person out there just waiting for any excuse and a “permission” to go out an kill anyone they don’t deem the right kind of people.
There is actually a long history of linking disease to outgroups. In the 14th century Jews where blamed to spread the plague through poisoning wells and in the 17 century people where blamed of “greasing” doorknobs with puss from the diseased.
And later modern, scientific racism combined with the new germ theory created the theory that africans and to a lesser extenct “orientals” where inherently dirty and the spreader of germs. The 1918 FLu-Pandemic for example was used to further cement racial segregation in south africa and some of the first measures there was to forbid the black population from entering the cities.